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A Star Is Born in Berlin by Paul Moor, MusicalAmerica.com Wednesday, February 6th 2002

BERLIN -- Since Kent Nagano took over the leadership of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Berliners have grown accustomed to some fairly extravagant ideas of programming, but this week must have set some kind of record.

Monday's night's began with Luciano Berio's 1968 realization of Claudio Monteverdi's 1624 cantata "Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda" (The Conflict Between Tancred and Clorinda). After that came a 40-year-old echo of that unmissed aberrational phase of Europe's musical avant-garde that called itself "instrumental theater," György Ligeti's "Aventures." Only after the intermission did the part come that had justified the concert's billing as "gala": a concert performance of Act 2 of Camille St.-Saėns's opera "Samson et Dalila," flaunting two of today's stellar vocalists, Olga Borodina and Plįcido Domingo.

(~Even at gala prices, a capacity audience packed Berlin's Philharmonie; in fact, the gauntlet of hopefuls pleading for tickets one had to run began a full block away from the entrance.~) One Berlin critic evidently kept an eye on his watch during the evening; by his reckoning the entire concert lasted only 90 minutes, with much of the St.-Saėns segment devoted to the harangue between Delilah and the High Priest (Sergei Leiferkus, first-rate), leading into that critic's grumpy question "Ten minutes of Plįcido Domingo for 125 Euros?" (roughly $100).

Both Borodina and Domingo did indeed treat us to some memorably fine vocalism - with Domingo sounding every bit as wonderful as he ever has, something of a miracle at the age of 60, but for not me alone the -->evening's vocal highpoint, in fact a revelation, came when a young Croatian tenor with the improbable name of Kresimir Spicer (:KrEshimir ShpItzer, u fonetskom originalu S sa `kvacicom'!) provided the first part's high point as the narrator in the Monteverdi; during the intermission, an enthusiastic little crowd of Berlin's musical sophisticates surrounded him in the Philharmoniker's backstage buffet crying for information about this vocal discovery. More about Spicer in a moment.

First, the shortest of shrift for the Ligeti abomination. The so[u!]briquet "instrumental theater" (think first and foremost the rather cumbersome high jinks perpetrated by Mauricio Kagel) applied to instrumental works that required the performers to horse around in one extra-musical way or another, to no apparent purpose. In 1962 it pleased Ligeti to perpetrate a work for two sopranos and one baritone in an invented nonsense language he called "asemantic." Their particular horsing around toward one another supposedly conveys such emotions as anxiety, boasting, foolishness, and so on.

Uncertain audience titters rewarded, for instance, the percussionist's using a carpet-beater the size of a tennis racket to wallop a sort of miniature mattress beneath it, or pop an inflated paper bag, or when the three long-suffering but impressively capable singers (Sarah Leonard, Linda Hirst, and Omar Ebrahim) pinched their nostrils closed to produce an unattractive nasality, or when they picked up small megaphones from the floor and bellowed through them into the auditorium. I had heard about "Aventures" sporadically ever since its world premiere, but until this week my luck had held out against actually encountering such rubbish.

During rehearsals for this concert, Nagano had reported things "going really well" with "quite a chemistry between Domingo, Borodina, and the orchestra," but conceivably those rehearsals took place in the DSO's stageless rehearsal room and not on the stage of the Philharmonie. At the concert, things went logistically wrong from the start of the St.-Saėns, for instead of a strictly concert performance, the performers decided to incorporate a modicum of physical histrionics - and when you turn two such impressively endowed and experienced singing hams loose with no control whatever to rein them in, musical disaster automatically threatens.

At the worst moments Monday evening, it didn't only threaten. Leiferkus's segments provided him scant opportunity to spread himself, but Borodina almost immediately turned into the very model of an old-fashioned primissima donna of the most self-indulgent sort. Unabashedly, arrogantly, almost contemptuously, she ever more and more ostentatiously turned her back completely towards Nagano - and any opera's conductor must always remain in control musically.

Poor Nagano could only pivot back and forth on the podium, sometimes looking almost pleadingly at the singers behind him, hopefully trying to catch an eye at least occasionally, usually with no success whatever. As a result, Borodina and Domingo mostly did what singers unfortunately will, given half a chance; they indulged themselves in the most narcissistic, self-serving manner of performance imaginable. We did indeed hear great, surging billows of glorious vocalism - but music? In spite of Nagano's valiant exertions, music to a large extent simply went down the drain.

But let's get back to the -->truly musical highlight of the evening. Note the name - write it down, memorize it - of Kresimir Spicer, for me the most exciting vocal discovery since Thomas Quasthoff exploded into my ken five or six years ago. Artists' program biographies tend to vaunt, but Spicer's perceptibly does its best to inflate such things as he has done to date. Little wonder, since he gives his age at merely 25!

Born in Slavonski Brod, he studied in Zagreb and Amsterdam, where he settled - and even while still a student he appeared in professional productions there of "Don Carlo" and "Gianni Schicchi." Last June he first attracted major international attention at the Aix-en-Provence Festival when William Christie cast him as Ulysses in Monteverdi's opera with Christie's splendid ensemble Les Arts Florissants, with Marijana Mijanovic singing opposite him.

Gaėtan Naulleau wrote in "Le Monde" on June 13: "The eve of the premiere, nobody knew Marijana Mijanovic (Penelope) and her companion Kresimir Spicer (Ulysses). The next day, their names drew moved smiles upon all the lips of the people in Aix plus enthusiastic babbling." -->Residents of greater New York may anticipate a similar experience when the -->Brooklyn Academy of Music imports that production intact for the -->week beginning April 7.

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